Jools Rothblatt (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a Los
Angeles-based painter. Rothblatt’s subjects are typically found inside bars, family restaurant decor, faded commercial signs, stuff from around the neighborhoods she grew up in
especially. The figures and protagonists of the paintings
flail and combine in minimal, murky environments of predominantly red and green.
The distance between the viewer and what's depicted is emphasized in imprecision and balanced out in a kind of tragic comedy. In the film Three Women, Shelley Duvall's character makes a point to write in her diary every day "even if not much happened anyway” and there is something similar happening in Rothblatt’s paintings, capturing the tragic comedy of our day-to-day life.
Inspired by artists such as Chaim Soutine, Lee Lozano, Philip Guston, and Otto Dix, Rothblatt’s paintings display a notable vitality, dynamism, and persistence in their scrutiny of socialized gender or body politics, and energetically critiqued norms of respectability and behavioral customs.
